Sailing Towards Sustainable Future with Wooden Cargo Schooner

In the context of accelerating climate change, people’s attempt to reduce their CO2 footprints and shipping companies' struggles to meet ever-stricter emission regulations, the interest towards sail powered commercial vessels is growing. With this in mind, the preliminary design of a 65ft. wooden sailing cargo vessel will be undertaken, primarily intended for the use of sustainable sea transportation initiatives on coastal communities in third world countries. In conjunction to the design project, the pros and cons of laminated timber in structural marine applications and boat-building will be investigated, both from a sustainability and structural feasibility points of view. Laminated timber could have the potential for reducing the typically large amounts of wood waste in boat-building and enable the usage of slightly lower quality timber overall with the help of modern glues. Consequently, a wider variety of timber species could be utilized for structural applications on boat-building, and hence the pressure on commonly used timber stocks would be reduced. Structurally, laminated timber parts could lead to overall savings on vessel’s displacement and more efficient usage of vessel’s interior volume. Samples of local boat-building timbers from the designed vessel’s example area of construction/operation will be obtained, test pieces fabricated with several different glues and consolidation methods and materials testing conducted. The results will be used to ascertain the advantages/disadvantages of using laminated instead of solid timber, based on the comparison of their mechanical properties and the structural layout of the wooden cargo vessel designed. This analysis could provide a basis for larger scope research on wooden marine structures built out of timber and hopefully lead to reductions on wooden boatbuilding’s environmental impacts. Furthermore, the scope of the research can have an impact on other industries using laminated timber structures, such as house building/architecture.